


without subject

by mako_lies (wingeddserpent)



Category: Free!
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Self-Portrait, Sousuke and His Self-Esteem Issues, Well-Meaning Parents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 02:54:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9156655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wingeddserpent/pseuds/mako_lies
Summary: In junior high, Sousuke has to make a self-portrait during art class. He hates it about as much as you'd expect.





	

In junior high, they make self-portraits in art class. It’s right after they finish coating wire replicas of hands with clay, then painting them. His hand, he forms into a claw. Like it’s clawing its way out of something. Sousuke isn’t sure what that means, exactly, but the other boys like it. He waits about ten seconds before wondering if Rin would like it too.

(He sends a picture of it to Rin, but it gets lost in the mail. Anyway, it’d been stupid to send it. Rin can look at his own hands. Hands bent for swimming, not clawed for escaping.)

Sousuke isn’t an artist. His favorite subject is history, and he hates English. Still, art is low on his list of things he likes doing with his time. The hand thing was pretty cool, sure, but now he stares at the blank sheet of paper hoping he’ll discover what to draw. It isn’t that, exactly. No. He knows what to draw. A self-portrait doesn’t leave a lot of questions on subject. Hell, it isn’t even difficult. A jaw. Two eyes for seeing. A mouth for eating. Two ears for listening. Some hair and stuff. That’s all it takes to make him. But he stares and stares at the paper, and Moriyama-sensei comes over to ask about his drawing, and gives suggestion after suggestion, but all Sousuke can do is wonder what to draw.

During recess, he sketches out face after face. Faces that are arguably his, for their possession of eyes and ears and mouths and noses. Each blanker than the last. Each lacking subject. He runs the rag across the floor during cleaning time and imagines that quirk of the lips that might make a face his.

The quirk never comes, and the other kids laugh at his numerous attempts. Finally, as they near the end of the unit, and his paper sits just as faceless as ever, he takes the blue pastels. Sousuke pours the pastel into water on the page. He fills it with endless blue, dappling as much as his (lack of) skill allows.

If nothing else, he knows water. The feel when it’s slightly too early in the year to submerge yourself. The resistance you have to push past to improve your time. The way it gently lifts you on a bad day. Still, the creation of water is different from swimming. Even as the others snicker— _of course, of course he would make it about swimming_ —he finally adds a faceless head surfacing. No body. No eyes or ears or anything. Just a head perhaps above the water.

He gives it to his parents with burning ears immediately upon getting it home. Sousuke never sends a picture of it to Rin, and Rin never sends anything back. Easier that way, really, even as Sousuke waits on the steps for the mailman every day. Just a routine, now. Not even an important one.

 

His mom, bless her, makes him a scrapbook when he graduates high school. “Look at everything you’ve accomplished,” she tells him, with her gentle, even voice. That misleading delicate one. The one she used every time she suggested that maybe Rin wasn’t going to write him back. The one she’d used every time she suggested that maybe it was better for him not to swim.

Even before he opens it, he knows he can’t show it to Rin. Rin would hate to see Sousuke's life portrayed the way his mom undoubtedly chooses to portray it. This is a plea like all the others. A plea aimed at protecting him. From what, he isn’t sure. He’s doing what they’d wanted all along: going to university, then coming back to work the shop. Probably getting married and having kids for them too. What was left to need protection from, with all that to look forward to?

The old, stabbing feeling in his gut. It got easier to ignore over time. He hopes he’ll be able to ignore it totally. Sousuke doubts it.

 

Her carefully cultivated scrapbook carves out (so obviously) anything of swimming. Except for one thing. That damn self-portrait. To omit the evidence of swimming, but keep the coalescence of swimming and self. His mouth quirked the way he hadn’t been able to capture then. Oh, but he loves his mother.

 

It’s probably drink that possesses him. It’s usually drink that possesses him. He hangs it. That damn self-portrait. Sousuke hangs it on his damn fridge like an over-proud parent. Every time he drinks juice out of the carton, every time he reaches in for a beer, he has to look at the thing. Has to look at the rendering of self that doesn’t resonate anymore.

Or maybe it does resonate, but the reality—

Well. It’s _Sousuke_ who avoids Rin’s calls now. Not out of retribution or disinterest or anything crazy like that. When has Sousuke ever been able to hold anything against Rin? But all their talks loop back to the shoulder, shoulder, shoulder. Rin’s optimism as chafing as his mother’s pessimism. Everybody acting as though Sousuke isn’t aware of the sum total of his potential.

University. Shop. Marriage. Children.

It’s not a bad life, probably. An ideal life built on solid principles from people who understand how gratifying such a life will be. A good, cozy, acceptable life without disappointment. Without room for Rin’s dreams that mirror those old dreams of Sousuke’s. Room for Rin—always—but not his expectations. The sooner Rin gives up on him, the better off they’ll all be.

 

The portrait consumes him. Even if he takes it down, it won’t—the image of the head submerging or surfacing, the blue smears of pastel. He drew himself and drew this, this inescapable vision (of past, present, and future denied). Where is self, where is completion in it? What had created in himself? The answer’s a simple one.

So so painfully simple. Sousuke drains the rest of his beer, leaning far back on his sofa. His shoulder twinges—the beer is heavy in his hand, after all, but it isn’t guilt that weighs him. Sousuke will become like one of those salarymen who only talk about their high school days and how amazing they were. “Well, you see, I once swam with gold medalist Mastuoka Rin.” It’ll bring a fond tear to his eye as he drinks that painfully generic enkai beer. “We were best friends, once.”

And that story will be that, and they’ll move onto discussion about other pasts and work and wives and children. Sousuke will laugh in all the right places as he switches from beer to shochu. They’ll tug him to the second and third parties, and by the end, he’ll have forgotten the year and all that’s come before—the way he’s supposed to. Easier that way. Easier than remember that Matsuoka Rin was once his best friend. The best friend he couldn’t follow.

For now, Sousuke thumbs through the album again. Origami paper and pictures and pamphlets and other things taped in so carefully. So purposefully. Is this the ideal life they envision for him, or is it merely the life he’s left with, now that he’s been stripped of dreaming?

It’s pathetic. There’re no delusions. He is exactly that, the man who can’t let go of high school, of middle school, of goddamn elementary school. He’s the kid who waited by the mailbox every day for four years before taking a hint (and even after that, he’d still wait a couple days a week). Sousuke’s never been any good at letting things go. So here he is, thumbing through this album, considering only the stripped capacity of future. Perhaps this has to be his life, then.

 

Sousuke lays out the album like an offering on his bookshelf. Turns his gaze back to his business textbook. Turns his attention back to the future he can achieve. His goals clear as they were before, only real now.

For all they’re not his, he’ll achieve them. He has to.


End file.
